I'm thought-dumping on my blog again.

In Civil Procedure last semester, whenever we'd learn a federal rule with a "process" to it, our prof would tell us, "It's always important to know the process"..."you HAVE to know the process"...blah blah blah. Well...turns out Prof. Eaglewoman crawled into my brain today at church.

We were talking about being "born again". We talked about how a change of heart is a process and blah blah blah (the usual). But today I got to thinking about how everything in the church is a process...a NEVER ENDING process. I would expect myself to be frustrated with that. I am not one to be patient through a learning process. If I don't pick it up right away, I quit. Who has the patience to practice continually, never knowing if you'll master something in the end? Not I. For some reason that is very different with the gospel. I wonder if some of our ideas in the LDS church are so hard to fathom for that very purpose...to force people to continually learn, to work at eventually mastering a concept.

I'm not making sense...so let's get specific. There were a few things that came to my mind during Sunday School today: the Atonement, charity, and the Plan of Salvation. These are things that I don't think we will ever be able to fully understand. No matter how much we learn about them, read about them, etc. ...we will never be able to fully fathom the extent to which they exist. I think to fully understand one of these things would be to fully understand the others. Not possible. The concepts seem simple enough...but getting to the bottom of them is another story. I will never fully understand the love that our Heavenly Father had for us in order to let His only son go through the things He had to endure. Maybe I don't understand it because I don't understand the depth of charity, the pure love of Christ. Maybe it's a selfish thing...but no matter what, we're human...we're ALWAYS going to have something that holds us back from that wholeness and perfection. These are concepts that we can spend our whole lives trying to understand and yet still never truly get. And the more I think about it, the more I wonder if that's the point.

So being born again and having a change of heart is a process. If the end of that process was something we could obtain in this life, what would we continually work for? If it was something we could learn and understand, then we would have a finishing point. I think the point is that we DON'T. We can work our whole lives to figure it out, but won't understand it until we are perfect, like Christ. The point is the process, not the actual understanding. The growing. The learning. Ughh.

I guess it's kind of like getting a trophy for "participation" when you were in little league softball or city rec basketball. The stars on the team that had things figured out weren't the only ones carrying around trophies...each kid got one...for trying, learning, growing, being a part of the team. We'll get a trophy for doing the same. We're not expected to know it all or have it all figured out. As long as we're trying. We're not perfect...we're not going to be perfect. We're all little leaguers here.

Frustrating? a little, yes. Comforting? definitely.